Hi all
Chief idiot speaking here, with an appeal to do the obvious - as so often prompted on this forum - and BACK UP YOUR FILES!
I've just lost about 3 weeks' worth of material through my own stupidity.
I'd got pretty laissez-faire about it since having a couple of new and completely faultless SD cards for several months; absolutely no glitches, no matter what I did. "Great", I thought. "An entirely functional machine at last!"
Yesterday, having exported some tracks to the Audio Depot, I thought I'd transfer them to PC in my usual fashion (remove the card, access it directly from the PC).
All was going well, until I noticed the File Explorer window had disappeared. Went to reopen and got a 'this disk is not formatted' Windows error (ie card not readable, no drive letter assigned). Multiple attempts on this and three other PCs (all Win10) gave the same result.
"No matter", I thought. "It's just a Windows glitch, the DP24 will be fine."
It wasn't. "No card" said the DP24.
The long and short: I downloaded several recovery applications. One called ZAR did the best job, although the DP card file structure was a bit strangely distributed. What I got back, were:
- partial reconstructions of the songs in the MUSIC folder; some tracks intact, some garbage (digital noise)
- some v-tracks intact, others missing or garbage (a lot of the material ZAR had placed in a folder ominously labelled "Fragments" - including the whole MUSIC folder)
- all Audio Depot contents intact - except for one file (more in this in a moment*)
- a whole folder of WAV files (which ZAR put into a separate folder) which turned out to be old Audio Depot contents (so interesting/useful potentially to know these might be recoverable) - sadly not from my recent work
[*when I was exporting to the Audio Depot initially, I had an export error first time around. It was fine second time. This is the only error I've had with these cards in the DP24. I assume the garbled recovered file is this one (TRK01_01 I think it was called).
This export error had followed on from me trying to cut the length of the track prior to exporting: what I'd recorded was three passes through the whole song, making very long tracks, and I wanted to trim them back to a usable length first. This involved deleting markers and moving the OUT marker (which had been right at the end) before the export operation. I wonder if this created the export glitch in the first place perhaps.]
What I'm missing:
- most of the 'hidden' v-tracks, which just leaves me the bounced stems which had been exported
- my dignity
What I've learned:
- BACK UP EVERY TIME
- I may revert to using the DP-PC USB link, although it's slow, rather than accessing the card directly through Windows; I wonder if Windows 'did something' which messed up the card's structure/contents
- When I bounce down (to free up tracks), I will probably export those original tracks before moving to new v-tracks (if I'd done that, I'd probably have all the recordings by now; as it stands I need to recreate all those bounced parts)
- don't mess around too much with the markers, maybe, until after I've safely exported to audio depot
- BACK UP EVERY TIME
Please feel free to post 'told you so'-type posts. I deserve it!
Stew
Chief idiot speaking here, with an appeal to do the obvious - as so often prompted on this forum - and BACK UP YOUR FILES!
I've just lost about 3 weeks' worth of material through my own stupidity.
I'd got pretty laissez-faire about it since having a couple of new and completely faultless SD cards for several months; absolutely no glitches, no matter what I did. "Great", I thought. "An entirely functional machine at last!"
Yesterday, having exported some tracks to the Audio Depot, I thought I'd transfer them to PC in my usual fashion (remove the card, access it directly from the PC).
All was going well, until I noticed the File Explorer window had disappeared. Went to reopen and got a 'this disk is not formatted' Windows error (ie card not readable, no drive letter assigned). Multiple attempts on this and three other PCs (all Win10) gave the same result.
"No matter", I thought. "It's just a Windows glitch, the DP24 will be fine."
It wasn't. "No card" said the DP24.
The long and short: I downloaded several recovery applications. One called ZAR did the best job, although the DP card file structure was a bit strangely distributed. What I got back, were:
- partial reconstructions of the songs in the MUSIC folder; some tracks intact, some garbage (digital noise)
- some v-tracks intact, others missing or garbage (a lot of the material ZAR had placed in a folder ominously labelled "Fragments" - including the whole MUSIC folder)
- all Audio Depot contents intact - except for one file (more in this in a moment*)
- a whole folder of WAV files (which ZAR put into a separate folder) which turned out to be old Audio Depot contents (so interesting/useful potentially to know these might be recoverable) - sadly not from my recent work
[*when I was exporting to the Audio Depot initially, I had an export error first time around. It was fine second time. This is the only error I've had with these cards in the DP24. I assume the garbled recovered file is this one (TRK01_01 I think it was called).
This export error had followed on from me trying to cut the length of the track prior to exporting: what I'd recorded was three passes through the whole song, making very long tracks, and I wanted to trim them back to a usable length first. This involved deleting markers and moving the OUT marker (which had been right at the end) before the export operation. I wonder if this created the export glitch in the first place perhaps.]
What I'm missing:
- most of the 'hidden' v-tracks, which just leaves me the bounced stems which had been exported
- my dignity
What I've learned:
- BACK UP EVERY TIME
- I may revert to using the DP-PC USB link, although it's slow, rather than accessing the card directly through Windows; I wonder if Windows 'did something' which messed up the card's structure/contents
- When I bounce down (to free up tracks), I will probably export those original tracks before moving to new v-tracks (if I'd done that, I'd probably have all the recordings by now; as it stands I need to recreate all those bounced parts)
- don't mess around too much with the markers, maybe, until after I've safely exported to audio depot
- BACK UP EVERY TIME
Please feel free to post 'told you so'-type posts. I deserve it!
Stew
